Attach ments(28)

He stopped at a printer and opened it, just to look like he had something to do. Which desk was he looking for? Maybe the one with the R.E.M. stickers. Probably not the one with the stuffed Bart Simpson and half a dozen fully poseable Alien action figures …but maybe. Maybe. Would Beth have a Page-a-Day cat calendar? A potted plant? A Sandman poster? A Marilyn Manson press pass?

A Sandman poster.

He looked back at the copy desk. He could hardly see the copy editors from here, which meant they could hardly see him. He walked over to Beth’s cubicle, to what he thought was her cubicle.

A Sandman poster. A Rushmore poster. A three-year-old flyer for Sacajawea at Sokol Hall. A dictionary. A French dictionary. Three books by Leonard Maltin. A high school journalism award.

Empty coffee cups. Starburst wrappers. Photographs.

He sat at her desk and lamely started to take apart her computer mouse.

Photographs. One was a concert photograph, a guy playing guitar. Obviously her boyfriend, Chris.

In another frame, the same guy sat on a beach. In another, he wore a suit. He looked like a rock star even without the guitar. Slender and slouched over. Never quite smiling. Always looking past the camera. Shaggy. Roguish. Handsome.

There were family pictures, too, of angelic dark-haired babies and nice-looking, well-dressed adults —but none of them seemed to be Beth. They weren’t the right age, or they were standing with what were clearly husbands or children.

Lincoln went back to looking at the boyfriend. Looking at his not-quite smile and his sharp cheekbones. At his long, twisting waist. He looked like he had a get-out-of-jail-free card in his back pocket. If you looked like that, a woman would forgive you. She would expect to have to forgive you now and then.

Lincoln set the mouse down and walked back to the information technology office. Lumbered back.

He could see his dim reflection in the darkened office windows along the hall. He felt heavy and plain.

Lumpy. Thick. Gray.

He shouldn’t have done that. What he’d just done. Gone to her desk.

It felt wrong, like he’d crossed a line.

Beth was funny. She was smart. She was interesting. And she had the sort of job that made someone more interesting. The sort of job a woman would have in a movie, a romantic comedy starring John Cusack.

He’d wanted to see what she looked like. He’d wanted to see where she sat when she wrote the things he read.

He was glad he hadn’t found a picture of her. It had been enough to see the pictures of people she loved. To see how he didn’t fit into them.

“I THOUGHT THAT if I moved back home,” Lincoln said to Eve when she called the next day, “that I’d get a life.”

“Are you retarded?”

“I thought you stopped saying ‘retarded’ and ‘gay’ so that your kids wouldn’t pick it up.”

“I can’t help it. That’s how retarded you sound right now. Why would you think that? And why would you refer to it as moving back home? You never moved out.”

“Yes, I did. I left for college ten years ago.”

“And you came back every summer.”

“Not every summer. There were summers when I took classes.”

“Whatever,” she said. “How could you think that moving in with your mother full-time would help you get a life?”

“Because it meant that I was finally done with school. That’s when all my friends got lives, after they graduated. That’s when they got jobs and got married.”

“Okay …”

“I think I missed my window,” he said.

“What window?”

“My get-a-life window. I think I was supposed to figure all this stuff out somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-six, and now it’s too late.”

“It’s not too late,” she said. “You are getting a life. You’ve got a job, you’re saving up to move out.

You’re meeting people. You went to a bar …”

“And that was a disaster. Actually, everything has been a disaster since I quit school.”

“You didn’t quit school,” she said. He could hear her rolling her eyes. “You finished your master’s degree. Another master’s degree.”

“Everything has been a disaster since I decided my life as it was wasn’t good enough.”

“It wasn’t good enough,” she said.

“It was good enough for me.”

“Then why have you been trying so hard to change it?”

THAT SATURDAY NIGHT, Lincoln played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time in a month.

Christine grinned when she saw him at the door.

“Lincoln, hey!” Christine was short and round with rumpled blond hair. She was carrying a baby in some sort of sling, and when she hugged Lincoln, the baby was smushed between them.